random thoughts from york

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So I’ve attended my first “as yet officially unnamed meetup of people interested in FI/RE”* in York along with Mrs T at the weekend, and what a fantastic time we had! For a more thorough write up of what we all got up to, you are best off heading over to Huw’s blog, but I thought I’d put up some thoughts on random stuff I found interesting when talking with people at the meetup.

*I guess you could unofficially call it an “FI aficionado meetup” or should that be “aFIcionado meetup”? Huw if you are reading there’s another idea for the name of the meetups, although it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue does it? 🙂 – I much prefer my original idea which was a “FIRE Assembly”

it’s never too late to start…

… although somehow it actually always feels like you started too late. Yes everyone (myself included of course!) mentioned that they wish they’d found out about FI sooner and that was completely across the board, from the slightly older but still very early retired compared to the standard retirement age people there, to the 20 somethings! This is a strange phenomena but I guess it’s also very easy to understand why; once you’ve “taken the red pill” your outlook on life changes so drastically you wonder how you ever lived in blissful ignorance before that point.

Until time machines are invented it’s probably not worth spending too much time agonising over the what ifs, I don’t think anyone was really but “I wish I’d started earlier” was definitely a common phrase I heard mentioned.

everyone there was a frugal badass!

It may pain me to admit this but I am not one to delude myself (for too long at any rate!). I don’t have the exact figures, but I would hazard a guess that everyone we met are far more frugal than we are. Rather than be disheartened by all of this, I look to the people we met as inspiration and I fully subscribe to the to achieve greatness you must first admit that you suckline of thinking. The bottom line is that there is still plenty of low hanging fruit to cut out of our budget and all of the people in York attest to the fact that you can still live full, rich, and exciting lives without spending wodges of cash.

We also got some great tips from some of the people there. A really good one that stuck out in memory was how to spend the Tesco Vouchers you can get via TopCashback, which I wrote about here – shout out to A&Z for that one – thanks! My initial thoughts were just to use them on the 4x rate at restaurants and other places of entertainment. However we were talking about home renovations and they mentioned that you can get 3x your voucher value at Tops Tiles, which is going to come in very handy for when we do up our bathroom and kitchen at the end of the year. This should save us around £300 on something we’d definitely have bought anyway (rather than the “entertainment” stuff which is entirely optional) so as I say, great tip! The same couple also told us that it is easy to accrue cash back by signing up with casino and/or bingo accounts, something that I had not really considered before and will be trying out over the coming weeks. I will report back here how that turns out no doubt 🙂

does consuming first make it easier to save later?

I may be way off the mark here but we were chatting with some of the younger members of “the crew” and I got the feeling that the relentless frugality may have started to bog them down a bit, with such a large 10-15 year time horizon before they will hit FI. As I mentioned we are not exactly mega frugal but are still managing to sock away around 50% of our income, however I think the “sacrifices” we have made since starting on the road to FIRE haven’t seemed like sacrifices at all. I also think we could go a lot more hardcore and still not really be all that bothered about it. I think this is at least in part down to the fact that we’ve had a good 7-8 working years of just spending everything we’ve earned… a.k.a being normal consumers, travelling the globe and buying pretty much what we wanted. I feel like I’ve gotten most of that out of my system. Look, I’m not saying we aren’t going on holiday or anything any more as we clearly are getting about (more than ever perhaps!), but it is just a lot more local and a lot cheaper than in previous years. We are definitely buying less consumer goods and this does not feel like a loss in the slightest.

I guess what I am saying is that with a 10+ year horizon it might pay dividends for your mindset to just blow out and treat yourself to something that is really valuable to you, every now and again.

The counter point to this is that if you just start off frugal, then keep it that way, then there is no fat to cull later on down the line and so it is easier to just maintain that status quo. I think I can see both sides of the argument 1 to be honest and it probably depends on person to person!

making the journey part of the destination

I don’t really like fast travel so we tried to split the journey on the way up by stopping overnight at Sheffield, which worked fairly well.

On the way back we googled a couple of parks to stop at near the A1 instead of the usual service station pitstop. I would heartily recommend this strategy on future road trips! On the way home we stumbled across the lovely little town of Newark complete with canal lock and castle. This view sure beats a Starbucks and the M1!!!

other random thoughts on the meetup process itself

It was certainly a bit weird (in a good way) to just turn up and meet a complete bunch of strangers. It was even weirder when people asked if I blogged and I guessed I just had to answer… “Yes, I am the Firestarter” – well it certainly made me chuckle anyway 🙂

Some people just turned up on their own and for that I give them maximum kudos points! That must have been a bit nerve wracking.

Ultimately though, as Huw has pointed out many a time, everyone was very friendly, welcoming, and easy to talk to, and the whole weekend was very rewarding and enjoyable.

If you were thinking about coming to York and didn’t for any reason along the lines of worrying about it being a bit of a clique already I can assure you it was not like that at all. Also if you are worried you won’t bring anything to the conversation as you are still learning the ropes then you should completely reverse that thought process and definitely come along next time. You can learn a lot from all of the people there and everyone is more than willing to dish out advice. In fact you just learnt things by chatting really, it wasn’t exactly like any of the conversations were all one way traffic.

There is also talk of making the next one a bit more frugal in nature which should suit the general ethos of everyone involved a bit more. York was expensive and in all honesty I could have done without it in the middle of my two most expensive months of the year so far, but I am looking at the money as a bit of investment into making stronger personal relationships with people in this scene, so it was definitely money well spent. Next time we’ll keep it more on the frugal vibe no doubt, which is great news!

Did you come to the meeting?

If so what were your thoughts on it? Did anything stick out as a common theme or interesting to you? Let me know!

If you didn’t attend then let me know if you are thinking of attending the next one and what you’d like to see from it, and I can pass this on to Huw when the time comes.

I will leave you with a parting picture of the main “organiser” man himself in action, on our run on Saturday morning … 🙂

Nice write up of the weekend. I shared my view point of the weekend, and it’s great to see it from someone else.

It’s never too late – Here, here! The only thing you can do is start and keep going. I totally agree. Look at M’s little man at 2 – SIPP, ISA – Now that’s early. I’m grateful to have found it full stop.

Frugal Badasses – Too right. There are some frugal machine’s, and even if you think you’re frugal there’s no doubt you’ll find tips from someone who’s found a frugal way around something. Frugality is a HUGE world, and there is so much to learn. The weekend is excellent for this.

Does consuming first make it easier? – Great observation and question. Like you I think there are advantages to both. I lived the beer drinking, lads weekend culture for years, and went £10,000+ in debt so I fall into one camp for sure. Has that made it easier for me? Hard to say….
A lot of people might never have gotten out of the debt situation I was in. Debt can really impact your life and health.
However, it drew me to tracking debt repayments, which I was able to calculate my debt free date. I then competed to beat that date – and continued the process for saving, investing and now Kindle Income. It led me to what I’m doing now because I wanted to better myself.

Like you, I know that I could live on less money. My expenses are currently averaging £885 per month for 2015. If I HAD TO, to save my life or something, I could live close to £750 a month on average, and I would have to make sacrifices for that. I think I live a very comfortable life for that £885, and there is some excess in there that could be trimmed. I’m OK with that.
My focus for 2015 is making more money, to create more of a disposable income for myself that way (as a test). So far, I’m enjoying loosening the purse strings and earning more as a compromise.

Cracking call on stopping at Sheffield half way! The journey was horrible for us!

Thank you for expressing your views on the meet up – with nerves, concern they’re totally normal. It is strange meeting complete strangers, but so far I’ve had nothing but positive experiences and people I would now call friends off the back of it.

The next one will be much more frugal I promise. I’d like to incorporate some leisure activities on the side, as well as people talking on areas of interest. Everything will be optional, and people can come and go as they please the whole weekend. I would like to consolidate our spending and learning however and (in the FIRE mindset) get more bang for our buck, on these weekends.
I believe I can still achieve this and make the weekend relaxed, informal and friendly. That’s my challenge! I don’t want it to become a conference, but I want people to have the option to learn from experienced investors, frugal livers and income generators etc.

I’m excited about the growth and development of these meet ups. People keep asking what they’re going to be like in the future, and I’m afraid for now, I’ll be looking forward 1 at a time. I’m not put off by trying things out and then doing a U-turn and going back to what we did before if things don’t work out.

Having met you I really can’t imagine you doing the whole beer drinking lads thing, I guess you may have said the same about myself though?! We all change or grow up at some point and if you meet someone new, it is probably always hard to imagine them being any different from how they are right now I suppose.

Back to the money aspect, it is true that a lot will never get out of the debt situation but for the right kind of person it is often necessary to get that slap in the face/wake up call to initiate some real positive action. Again I would note that you are far more frugal than I am and I’ve never had any (consumer) debt, so on that statistically significant sample of 1 I guess my theory is proven beyond reasonable doubt 😉

In terms of future meet ups I am happy to go with the flow and see how mixing things up goes, as I am sure most will be.

Maybe I was a little bit down on the talks… It just reminded me of the forced presentations we have to do at work every so often where everyone is bored out of their brains. At least the subject material will be something that I am interested in this time. Heck maybe even I’ll do one one day, never say never and all that!

Re: expenses, mine are currently averaging around £1500 per month (that is just our joint average split down the middle which is probably a fair way to calculate it) so just over £600 more than yours. I was going to say my mortgage is probably a big chunk of that but I just had another look and it totally isn’t. Your mortgage and bills last month were £490 and mine are averaging £525 for the year so far. So it is fair to say pretty much all of that is discretionary spending and it wouldn’t be hard at all to get that down to around £1200 per month. I would be very happy with that as a balance between a frugal-ish life and “living for today” or spending on what is valuable to you or whatever you wanted to call it.

As far as the “least frugal” badge of shame goes though I doubt very much that you’d beat me to to it. Our monthly spend is often littered with unnecessary indulgences though usually they are in the form of meals out and trips away rather than clothes and “things”. Maybe I haven’t quite embraced the frugal lifestyle quite as much as I could/should purely because of your reverse “consuming first” effect. I have a very poor childhood and married young with kids following swiftly after so we lived on one modest salary for a significant number of years. It has only been in the last 10 years or so that we’ve been able to live anything approaching the high life. We still haven’t done much travelling abroad and have never been consumers of “lifestyle” products. This has actually been a bonus as now we really appreciate the value of having disposable income. Still I do feel a little guilty that we have so much “spare” to spend, save and invest when I know what its like to live very close to the edge.

Meeting and chatting at York was very enjoyable and I very much hope that we will catch up again at a future event. 🙂

Yes meals out and trips away tend to be our thing to splurge on as well. Not to say we haven’t ever splurged on “things” in the past but I am pretty much over all of that now, as I have enough things to last me a very long time (in fact I still have way too many things if I’m honest).

Not that you are but I wouldn’t worry about the reverse consuming effect, you’ve done all the calculations and are fast approaching an earlier than most retirement living the life you want to, which is ultimately the dream of most people on these sort of blogs regardless of absolute levels of spending!

Having a slight bit of guilt to keep you check is probably no bad thing either 🙂

All the best and yes I hope to catch up with you again at some point in the future also.

Great to meet you and the missus and thanks for putting down some interesting thoughts of the weekend.

I too highly recommend attending one of these gatherings/meet ups – brilliant to meet a broad range of people in their mid-20s right up to 50 somethings, all on the same path but at various stages!

I know what you mean about frugal badasses – I could do better if I tried but I’m comfortable with where I’m at. At some point, I may want to ramp the frugality up, which should hopefully see my savings/investments go up.

I didn’t get a chance to talk to A&Z about the bingo/casino sign ups via TCB but after my recent sportsbetting sign ups, I was planning on those so I’ll check them out again – look forward to reading your experience with them!

I think I know what you are getting at re the consuming first idea and I’d like to say that I agree with you. I’ve done my spendy, wasteful bit of consuming and I no longer need to do it any more, or rather, not to the extent where it will affect my savings/investments.

As regards your occasional blow out, some people have a long list of stuff that they want to do when they retire – if there is an opportunity to cross some of those things off my list, then I’ll do it since I’m still trying to live and enjoy my life – it doesn’t only start when I retire, haha!

Of the meeting itself, I loved the casualness of it as it made the atmosphere really relaxed and friendly. I got some great gardening tips (from you!), learned about other people’s investment strategies, about people’s jobs, different diets, exercise routines and a load of other interesting stuff.

One thought I had on obsessively getting your savings rate higher is that it must be sustainable. Like, if you manage to get it into 70% levels for a few months or even years, you have “the game” to keep you going. The thing is let’s say you hit FI very early based on that level of spending and then quit you are locked into that level for the rest of your life (assuming you don’t go back to work which I think for ERE’s is a very silly assumption anyway but…) so it might be a fools errand to ruthlessly get that saving rate up. Yes get it up as far as you can but make it comfortable, as you quite rightly point out.

I’ve done a couple of bingo type ones so far and neither have tracked properly so not going well to be honest! Have filed missing cashback claims on both and will try a few more over the next few weeks and report back once the verdict is in!

Very true about living your life now and having a bucket list is a great idea! I will eventually get round to putting one up on here one day I think (maybe that is the first thing on my list… to actually create one, haha!)

It was great wasn’t it!

Re: gardening: My chillies are currently fighting a battle to ripen before the first frosts set in! Alhtough I guess I can always just bring them inside, which I think I might well do.

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